113 research outputs found
A Labelled Analytic Theorem Proving Environment for Categorial Grammar
We present a system for the investigation of computational properties of
categorial grammar parsing based on a labelled analytic tableaux theorem
prover. This proof method allows us to take a modular approach, in which the
basic grammar can be kept constant, while a range of categorial calculi can be
captured by assigning different properties to the labelling algebra. The
theorem proving strategy is particularly well suited to the treatment of
categorial grammar, because it allows us to distribute the computational cost
between the algorithm which deals with the grammatical types and the algebraic
checker which constrains the derivation.Comment: 11 pages, LaTeX2e, uses examples.sty and a4wide.st
Syntactic and semantic mismatches in English number agreement
In English, it is possible for a morphologically singular collective noun like government to control both singular (syntactic) agreement and plural (semantic) agreement in the same sentence (e.g. The government has praised themselves). It has been claimed that sentences with the opposite pattern of agreeing elements are ungrammatical (e.g. *The government have praised itself), and there is a corresponding asymmetry in corpus frequencies of these two configurations. Across two acceptability judgement experiments, we show that the acceptability contrast is affected by the relative order of the two agreeing elements, with degraded acceptability in the case where the first agreeing element shows plural agreement and the second shows singular agreement, relative to the opposite configuration. This pattern is found both when the agreeing verb precedes the reflexive, and when the reflexive precedes the verb. Overall, the results suggest that the initial formation of a semantic agreement dependency between an agreement target and a collective controller makes subsequent morpho-syntactic agreement with the same controller less accessible. We argue that any theoretical account of these results would require an important role for incremental processing.  
Proximity and same case marking do not increase attraction effect in comprehension:Evidence from eye-tracking experiments in Korean
Agreement attraction in comprehension:Do active dependencies and distractor position play a role?
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Retrieval interference and semantic interpretation
Similarity-based interference has played an important role in motivating cue-based models of memory retrieval during language comprehension. One example of interference comes from illusions of grammaticality, where ungrammatical sentences are perceived as grammatical (e.g. ‘the key to the cabinets were rusty’). While such effects indicate interference influences perception of sentence grammaticality, less is known about how interference influences the semantic interpretation assigned to a sentence. We report two reading experiments that manipulated sentence plausibility, rather than grammaticality, as a diagnostic of interference. In both experiments, although reading times were longer for implausible sentences, this plausibility effect was reliably attenuated when a distractor item partially matched the cues at retrieval. We interpret these results as being compatible with the predictions of cue-based parsing. The illusions of plausibility that we report indicate that similarity-based retrieval interference has a potent influence on the semantic interpretation that is assigned to a sentence during processing
The real-time status of strong and weak islands
In two eye-tracking reading experiments, we used a variant of the filled gap technique to investigate how strong and weak islands are processed on a moment-to-moment basis during comprehension. Experiment 1 provided a conceptual replication of previous studies showing that real time processing is sensitive to strong islands. In the absence of an island, readers experienced processing difficulty when a pronoun appeared in a position of a predicted gap, but this difficulty was absent when the pronoun appeared inside a strong island. Experiment 2 showed an analogous effect for weak islands: a processing cost was seen for a pronoun in the position of a predicted gap in a that-complement clause, but this cost was absent in a matched whether clause, which constitutes a weak island configuration. Overall, our results are compatible with the claim that active dependency formation is suspended, or reduced, in both weak and strong island structures
The facilitatory role of regressions in recovery from processing difficulty:An application of the reverse boundary-change technique
The effect of referring expression on antecedent-grouping choice in plural reference resolution
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